trauma to tango
  • Home
  • Author
  • Kudos
  • Blog
  • Shop
  • Contact

The Hero's journey

6/19/2013

0 Comments

 
Consider Joseph Campbell’s daunting description of launching out on “the hero’s journey:” 


“Over and over again, you are called to the realm of adventure, you are called to new horizons. Each time, there is the same problem: do I dare? And then if you do dare, the dangers are there, and the help also, and the fulfillment or the fiasco. There’s always the possibility of a fiasco. But there’s also the possibility of bliss.” ~ Joseph Campbell, Pathways to Bliss


Compare this to stepping out on the dance floor: the trepidation of dancing with a new partner, risking some new steps, finding yourself in a new community with no assurances that you will even get to dance.


Dancing tango is a hero’s journey. How many times have you heard someone say in awe and admiration, “You dance tango? I could never do that. I am too shy and awkward.” Who of us did not have those same misgivings when we took our first lesson.


My first dance with a local in Buenos Aires was almost my last. After repeated solicitations, a pink-haired senior took pity on me and accepted my offer to dance. About a third of the way into the dance she stopped and started yelling at me in Spanish. I knew less Spanish than I did tango so had no way of escaping her assault. I begged for pardon in my most desperate English and she again took enough pity on me to finish the dance.  Fortunately it was the end of the dance set so I could escape without further humiliation. As I crawled off the dance floor Patricia greeted me with encouragement, “Well, at least you had the courage to dance.”


That is the hero’s journey. It begins with the courage to take risks and ends as a triumph or fiasco. But the hook is that seductive possibility of bliss.


Aydan Dunnigan


0 Comments

Tango and Hypnotism

4/22/2013

2 Comments

 
Is tango primarily a mind-game? I found this passage from Robertson Davies, World of Wonders, Penguin/ McMillan 1975 about hypnotism and it suggests some strange parallels with the mystique of the tango embrace:
"It's part kindness and part making them feel they're perfectly safe with you. That you're their friend even though they never saw you until a minute ago... You mustn't overdo it. No saying, "you're safe with me," or anything like that. You have to give it out, and they have to take it in, without a lot of direct talk... You to to look at them as if they was all you had on your mind at the moment, and you couldn't think of anything you'd rather do. You got to look at them as if it was a long time since you met an equal. But don't push; don't shove it. You have to be wide open  to them or else they won't be wide open with you."
Intriguing, yes?
2 Comments

Dancing in the Shadows - guest blog

2/24/2013

0 Comments

 
http://tangoheart.wordpress.com/2013/02/17/dancing-with-the-shadow/
  From the moment I started dancing, I began to meet many forgotten parts of myself. Tango has awakened dormant shadows from their deep slumber. I am never dancing only with my partner, I am also dancing with my inner-most self. I’ve looked into the mirror of the dance and witnessed some very surprising, abandoned parts of my being. In order to keep dancing, I’ve had to allow these parts to express and be re-embraced by me.  I am in a continuous dance play that reveals the hidden and the unknown.  I dance with my infinite light as well as my submerged darkness. I dance with my joy and bliss.  And I dance with my deepest, darkest shadows.
I like to think of these shadows as the lost aspects of my life experience that have been ignored and long forgotten. They are the rejected parts of my mind-body-spirit  left to the basement of unresolved memories. They are like rejected children that never received the love and attention they needed. So they collapsed inward upon themselves and became the left over products of old pain. But these shadows are also blessings. They are priceless treasures of beauty buried by old judgements. And these shadows are archetypes in disguise concealing both glorious goddesses and wretched demons. All of them have been waiting for some small chance to make their presence known. No shadow form is the polar opposite of the other. They are all just bits and pieces of a whole that have been judged to be "wrong" and stuffed away for another time when they can be either released, or empowered.
No one can hide a demon in the bedroom closet for very long. When the lights turn on in a darkened basement, all the imagined shadows disperse.   Every shadow embraced and held to the light reveals that the demon is nothing more than an Angel wearing the mask of human pain.  Beneath the face of misery lies a thousand smiling Buddhas. And as I dance, these masks are pulled away.  Nothing is easy about removing a mask that I've fooled myself into thinking serves me.  And yet, nothing is powerful about defending a facade.  But stripping it away is empowering because the rediscovered authenticity leads to more personal freedom.
Part of the beauty of this journey of discovery lies in the element of surprise. It's impossible to remember everything lost until it's been found again.  Most of us simply adapt, thinking that a compromised state of functioning is normal. But this is a lie, because if any part of the authentic self has been suppressed, then we are actually dis-empowered.  The lost and buried treasure of our submerged self is a place where our deepest power lies.  And to uncover the treasure again is to reclaim our natural inborn spiritual power.
For myself, finding the lost treasure trove has involved reconnecting with the Feminine Lover-Goddess. The Goddess has many forms.  But it is particularly the Lover-Goddess that often falls by the wayside.  She is by far the most culturally misrepresented and suppressed. And she is the hardest to re-embrace due to social conditioning. She is the pure, non-polarized, sexual expression of the Divine Feminine in full magnitude.  Yet she is portrayed through cultural filters of distortion, or told that her unique expression is wrong. So women in turn, tell themselves they are wrong.  I have told myself I am wrong. And that's how personal truth gets buried away in the hidden graveyard of the mind.
My Tango dancing journey has been stripping away defensive masks that no longer serve me. These are masks that conceal the inner Lover-Goddess. She is rising to the surface and coming into new and fuller life.  On the dance floor, this new life is nothing more than pure energetic expression.  (In the bedroom is another story!). But even in the "tame" context of the dance floor, I have found that she can sometimes be very frightening to both men and women alike. It's nothing the Lover-Goddess "does" or "says."  It's just her mere presence.  And the more her presence shows up, the more others become uncomfortable.  I have silently witnessed in fascination as the Lover-Goddess presence has plunged my male dance partners into their submerged shame.   And I've also witnessed this same presence unleash female onlookers into negativity.  In witnessing other people's shame and jealousy, I discover how to hold space for my own deep shame and jealously. I am practicing how to look at these shadows more clearly and perceive them without rejection.  I am learning how to hold them with love and compassion and allow them to express themselves like the children they are. I am setting them free by allowing them to have a long-awaited voice.  And in doing so,  I am peeling back my own layers of untruth and attempting to be delivered into my most outrageously beautiful truth!   And I no longer care who doesn't understand it.................

0 Comments

Trauma and Tango

1/27/2013

0 Comments

 
At first blush, it might appear rather brash and insensitive to consider childhood trauma and sexual abuse in the same context as dance, especially tango with its overtures of the sensual and erotic; this seemingly trivializes the pain and travesty of the one and degrades and sullies the other.
 
Such is the mystique of Tango, a dance that plumbs the depths of depravity and exposes something of elegance and beauty. Born in the brothels and bordellos of Buenos Aires and crafted on the blood soaked floors of slaughter houses, it embodies the human spirit’s indomitable thirst for music and movement and romance. Tango is a metaphor for the intertwining of the tragic and beautiful, the earthy and the ethereal. 


It was this bloodied image of redemption and transformation that convinced me that I would find healing of inner wounds through confronting and enacting those very dynamics on the dance floor.

0 Comments
Forward>>

    Author

    Aydan Dunnigan, Author of trauma to Tango, Social Worker, former Lutheran Pastor.

    Archives

    May 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    April 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013

    RSS Feed


Proudly powered by Weebly